As owner or manager of a brick and mortar business you are wondering whether your business should have a website.
Let’s say for example that you own and operate a designer clothes boutique located on a well frequented street. You don’t have a website and your patrons find you when they walk past your boutique window. You provide great value for money and five-star customer service. Some of your customers come back for repeat purchases.
What you might not realise is that more and more people look for information on the internet before making a decision to buy anything. Google, the internet search engine, is the #1 website used in Australia. If your competitors have an online presence and you don’t then chances are prospective customers may buy from your competition. This is just one reason as why your business would benefit from being found online.
Following is a list of at least 10 benefits a well designed website would contribute to your business
1. Being found on the internet to generate more business. As mentioned above this is the #1 reason, so people looking for the type of products or services your business provides can find you.
2. Advertising your products and services online for free. Let people know your business hours, how to contact you (email, telephone and why not Twitter detail) and where to physically find your business.
3. Pre-selling your products or services. You can attach a blog to your website so it’s easy to create fresh content regularly. With proper strategic planning and execution your website can play a very effective role in your overal salesforce.
4. Capturing email to build relationship and generate leads, new customers.
5. Nurturing your existing customers by informing them with new products, promotions, and generate repeat business.
6. Taking your Customer Service to the next level to differenciate further from your competition. For example your website could host a list of FAQ (frequent asked questions and answers about your product/services) to enable your customers to find solutions to questions they might have even if it’s 2:00AM or 7:00PM.
7. Build and expand your brand beyond traditional offline media such as newspaper, radio.
8. Online marketing. Turn your online visitors to prospective customers of your offline store.
9. Growing your business with selling direcly online. Be ready to expand your sales with e-commerce. The quickest way is to add a shopping cart to your wesbite.
10. Save on advertisement. If your website is optimised for search engines it will have more chance to rank well when people look for your products and services, especially now with search results that are localized. Paid publicity is also much less expensive online than with traditional media (e.g. TV) yet much more targeted. With online publicity you need a website to send traffic to.
After reading this list if you think your existing business would benefit from an online presence then you need carefully consider a plan to design and create an effective website. Depending on where you are in the process of setting up a website you can find resource that can help you by checking out the relevant category in the sidebar.
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